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After a brief hiatus, I'm back for our eleventh episode. This week I share why it's so important to take a break, to rest, and recharge your batteries.
Being a startup founder is not all private jets and parties. Truthfully, being a founder is a lonely, difficult, stressful, yet rewarding way to spend your life. James Gill started GoSquared with two friends from school in 2006, and in this podcast he shares his struggles, excitement, and everything in between with refreshing honesty.
Hi, everyone!
Welcome back to another episode of Lost and Founder.
I'm really pleased to be back. It's been a couple of weeks since we last did the show. Since we last did episode 10, all about time management and they received a lot of really great comments and feedback on episode 10 hopefully a lot of, you know, managing your time better than ever.
I'm I'm at least trying. I'm pleased to be back again, after a little break and I really wanted to talk today about taking a break and what to do when things can get overwhelming. And maybe when you feel like a lot of things are breaking around you and and hopefully help us think about getting back on track, getting back into the swing of things.
And moving forward more productively, happily more successfully than before. So hopefully that sounds like a good show. We'll see where it takes us. Let's dive right in episode 11. Here we go.
There's a quote. I think I may have mentioned in a previous episode, or at least I've written about it on my blog before, and it's from the street artists Banksy, and it's just simply learn to rest, not to quit. And I quite like this quote because it essentially it summarizes a lot of how I've chosen to spend my life at least.
And. And really pushes you to think about looking after yourself taking a break, but not giving up on things and not quitting. And I think this has been on my mind a little bit over the last few weeks, because I have to admit, I went for a bit of a patch of really feeling down, really feeling, I guess some people call it burnt out.
I think a lot of people have had these kinds of feelings over the last year and a half. We've all gone through some crazy stuff as a, as a planet with well, needless to say with the changes to our lifestyles that the pandemic has caused. And, and I think at times, you know, I was, I was reflecting and thinking I've never, never in all of my life.
Had such a monotonous sort of mundane routine where you're not, you're not separating out where you rest and live to where you work. You know, even when I was, since I was what, like three, four years old leaving her house and going into some form of nursery or school, and then as you grow up, you go to university in, in the end up going to an office and then suddenly over the last year, and you're in a.
We've all ended up living, working, exercising, eating, socializing, and the same place for everything. And I don't know, but I think there's definitely something for me. That's caused me to feel pretty exhausted by that. And I think a lot of that was starting to take its toll on me over the last few weeks.
I've spoken a lot on this podcast about how important the habits are for me. And I've talked a lot about what I've learned about building good, healthy habits. And unfortunately, over the last few weeks, a lot of those habits started to fall down. I been trying to wake up earlier, I've been trying to do more exercise.
I've been trying to get to bed at a more reasonable time. I've been trying to eat more healthily, been trying to be more, more organized. I've sort of been trying to be more conscious of my productive hours and when I work best trying to do things like save money, trying to create more. There's an argument there that I was taking on too much.
But also I was, I was just simply finding that I wasn't able to maintain all of those habits over the last few weeks, even though I had been doing so quite successfully before, and I was finding this was really taking a toll and becoming a, a self-fulfilling cycle where what I. What are struggling with was having a knock on effect.
And then I was not sleeping. I was not waking up at the right time, which had a knock on effect to how I started my day, which then caused me to have less productive days and feel bad about myself, which caused me to sort of eat less well. And then you end up going to bed later and the whole cycle just repeats and repeats and becomes worse and worse.
And I think that was just a really dangerous point because. I guess there's an aspect where coming back to our quote, you could just quit. You could just say stuff. It habits are not for me. There's better lifestyle. This better set up is not for me. I just can't do it. I'm going to resign myself to, to these, these less healthy ways of being and these, these ways that don't necessarily live up to who I want to be as an individual.
And And that's that's I guess a point where, where, you know, you have an option of falling off the wagon and some might call that. And I don't know. I, I, I, I think the knock on consequences of that longterm a really, really worrying and dangerous and not to get too serious about it, but I, I don't want to spend my life like that.
And and, and so I, I, I struggled with this quite a bit, and I was trying to think about how I. Address this. And I think as a desire, sometimes when you realize that you're not living up to how you want to be, that you try to get, try to sort it all out at once. And I think that's also not necessarily the solution.
I think on reflection, a lot of the breakdown of my habits and my, my, my way of working over the. A few weeks. It didn't warrant, restarting everything and jumping back into everything. What my body was trying to tell me, I think was James, you need to take a little bit of a breather. You need to take a little bit of a rest and different people have different ways of resting, I guess.
For me, all I think I needed was just to have a little bit of time to myself. Not like a month, not several weeks even, but even my weekends where we're busy and spent doing nice things, but they weren't my weekends and I didn't have my time. And so what I found incredibly incredibly valuable is just to have literally a day or two, where I had some me time to think about things, to reflect on things, to.
To contemplate why I was feeling like that. What was on my mind, what was worrying me? What was draining my energy? What was I struggling with and to try and just take that time to rest, not to get back onto things, but to rest, to reset and recharge the batteries. I think I was like no electric toothbrush when it, when it runs down.
It starts going. It doesn't stop. It just starts going really slowly and doesn't really brush your teeth properly other than that's what my one does anyway. I don't know. Maybe they've come on since that, but anyway, that was kind of like how my mind was and how my overall body was and that ain't a great place to be.
So I started to, to recharge and I think I just, I maybe had. Some time. I had some time to myself on a Friday and then Saturday, just to myself. And it was exactly what I needed. I think I took myself to a coffee shop. I brought my, my sketchbook and I just wrote some things out. I, I then spent some time just trying to get a few things in order taking off long overdue things I wanted to sort and spending some time looking forward as well.
Planning out some, some of the things I want to tack on and the objectives I have and getting clear on those goals. And I took some time to do this. I tried to be a bit more lenient on myself with some of my habits, rather than making myself feel bad about missing a run or waking up a little bit later.
I just try to let my body do what it needed to do. Maybe rest in a bit more. Try and get to bed a bit earlier and gradually, slowly but surely I started to get a bit better. I started to feel a bit stronger. I started to feel like myself again. I started to feel not just like myself, but a better version of myself.
And I'm very pleased to say that after taking some rest and taking some time, not a huge amount of rest and not a huge amount of time, but taking your bed, I feel like I'm getting back into the swing. It's a big reason why I didn't do a show the last couple of weeks. I got to that episode talent. I felt great, but I had been keeping it up on this weekly schedule and I, I think I needed some time to just breathe.
And so I tried to not make myself feel too bad about that. And then. I hope you don't feel so bad about not hearing my dulcet tones for a couple of weeks anyway. I'm sure it was fine. I'm sure there are other podcasts you might be able to tune into in the meantime. But but I think I feel good because part of the reason I do this podcast is not just because I've got nothing better to do, but it's it's because it's an important part of.
Reflecting on my own being of channeling, some of what I'm learning and hopefully sharing of others who might find it vaguely helpful and useful. And that's an important thing to me. And I want to try to keep doing that. And I want to look back in years to come and see this body of work I've produced and hopefully see that it's helped other people and, and be proud of that.
And, and the podcast is one of many, many things. That I'm trying to do that to, to, to get better. And, and I really want to make sure I can keep maintaining these healthy habits and building a stronger version of myself. And I don't think that's possible without every now and again, taking a bit of rest, taking a bit of time to recharge and reset and and that's what I've been trying to do.
And so I'd highly recommend if you've been in this sort of position. Yeah. I've heard from a lot of people that are a lot of people that have been really struggling coming out the back of, of, of the year and a half before had. And and, and I think in some ways we're not back to the world we were in before.
And so there's got to be ways we work together to cope and to, to build stronger and and different things work for different people. But I guess, And maybe some contrast to previous shows where I've talked to a lot about strong habits and productivity. Sometimes you need a week or two on productivity or rest and recuperation, and it doesn't even have to necessarily be a holiday, but it's just being conscious of it, bringing your attention to it and thinking as constructively and clearly as possible about how to resolve those things in.
Chairman of the mentor change that you want to see in, in your, in your own life and, and hopefully, hopefully they'll help and give you the energy to go again and to go stronger. So I hope that's helpful. That's of interest, I don't think in the past. So it and escalate scarily shared my, my ins and outs and my, my, my personal life, quite as much as I maybe on this show.
But but hopefully it's helpful and hopefully it, it makes you realize that if you're going through a tough time, you're not alone and that there are ways to push through and that you have it within you. To get through and you just need to take a bit of time to you and don't be ashamed or guilty about doing that.
You're the only one who's going to give yourself that time. So. So do it, and then I hope, I hope you feel all the better for it. So thank you. Thank you for listening. I'm very pleased to be back and I hope to catch you again soon. And have you been doing during the show? If you are, please do reach out, either leave a comment, tell a friend, tell me I'm always keen to hear from people who are listening.
Cause it's, it's a real pleasure. To chat. And and I love getting to know people here, listen to the show because I want to make the show better and more helpful for you. So thanks again for listening to each and every one of you. And I hope you enjoy your, your week ahead. Catch you next time.
Bye!